Life in the grisly quotidian

Madness and erectile dysfunction abound in South American fiction - and flatulence is often a problem too. Whores are always laughing, some people live to be 100 and others learn to fly. Magic realism has spawned some marvellous novels, but there have also been many laborious and waffly imitations. When anything is possible in fiction, the risk is that everything becomes inconsequential. "Invention" stands in for credible plots and characters.

Laura Restrepo is Colombian and Delirium is about madness, but there is nothing "magical" here. Early on, a character establishes that madness "isn't beautiful at all, but petrifying and horrendous". Restrepo has spent much of her life in political organisations tackling repression and injustice. An admirer, critic and former journalistic colleague of García Márquez, she dislikes his flowery interpretations of their country's history. In this superb translation by Natasha Wimmer, Delirium has a determined and muscular narrative, with dry humour and a terrible sense of menace.

The narrative is divided among four characters who relate their stories in a stream of consciousness. Actually, it's not so much a stream as a system of them; each branch strewn with a flotsam of remembered events and conversations undifferentiated by punctuation. Restrepo is in sufficient command to make the method work.

Professor Aguilar is a lecturer who sells dog food now that student unrest has closed the university. Having left his wife, Agustina, for four days while he travels out of town, he returns to find she has disappeared. A message on the answerphone tells him to pick her up from a hotel, but the woman he finds there seems completely altered - deranged, in fact. What has happened in those four days?

The next 300 pages disclose personal and political answers: there are family dramas - a brutal father, an affair, a mad grandfather. Agustina's ex-boyfriend Midas, who works for the drug lord Pablo Escobar, is the novel's most fascinating character. A poor boy whose determination to be accepted by the oligarchy has led him into drug-trafficking and money-laundering, he retains a residue of conscience - risky in Colombia.

One of his associates, Spider, can't get an erection, but hopes that Midas can help by organising some private time with "a pretty twosome, nice white girls with dirty minds, virginal dykes". This and a display of sado-masochism yield limp results, and so Spider takes things up a notch: he wants "to see a girl suffer for real".

What follows is the more horrifying for being set against a larger horror: that of life in Bogotá, a city where 63 bombs can go off in a day because "Pablo is in a bad mood".

The tempo and tension in Delirium are handled with such exquisite care that at times you have to force your eyes along the lines of print. But Restrepo also offers moments of delightful observation. Midas boasts of all the gadgets he can control remotely from his bed: "I dim the lights and adjust the temperature, I make my Bose stereo thunder, I open and close curtains, I brew coffee as if by magic." The hotel receptionist has French flags painted on her nails and a philosophical attitude to the clientele: "it's either sex, alcohol, drugs, beatings, or shootings, that's what it boils down to, life is like that, even strange behaviour can be monotonous".

Where magic realism lent supernatural importance to mundane events, Delirium shows strange things to be part of a grisly quotidian. The question is how anyone can remain sane in such a society. "I'm going to spend my fortune making this country weep," Pablo Escobar tells Midas. The real Escobar has been dead for 13 years - but Colombia still has much to weep about.